Bonkers wrote:I opened my copy of 225 this past Saturday. What is up with the sound quality on the SinclaireStyle tracks??
Loudness War. Heard of it?
It's getting ridiculoud these days on certain tracks. The loudest SinclaireStyle track is "Passport To Dance". I have professional monitor headphones worth 160$ a pair (I think it's like 200$ MSRP too) and even with those, you can hear distortion in those explosion in the intro. I even emailed them about it and here is the answer...
1st reply:
We are aware of the "War of loudness" side-effects and we always try not to cut our tracks in dynamic too much.
Anyway, regarding "Passport to dance" the distorted effect should be only on big explosion in the intro-part. No other distortion should be listened in the track.
Obviously, it's not the case.
Then, I answered...
2nd reply:
Unfortunately the "War of loudness" is not easy to stop because many customers from all over the world are now addicted in having very loud levels in their IPods headphones. Therefore all our tracks must come out from our studios at very loud level. Sometimes it can happen that leveling the compilation CD mastering some track it's rised up too much.
Huh?! NO! The people who are asking for it are the labels who think that the louder the music, the more people will buy the music. This is BS! There are even studies on that and it does not encourage it! (Lengthy read here:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep11/a ... udness.htm) All it does is that it DESTROYS the music. That's why vinyl is becoming popular again: to press a good vinyl, you need to meet certain conditions:
1. It is not a fully automated process like CDs, you actually NEED some skills.
2. If you record it like on CDs with loudness war, it's gonna sound like SHIT. You actually need to have your dynamic range right.
Anyway. You should go, search and listen videos about it on Youtube.